Archive for the ‘News media’ tag
DotSpots’ Farhad Mohit on Pervasive Wikis, Google’s SideWiki and Information Militias
I ran across DotSpots in Jerimiah Owyang’s blog yesterday, which was about SideWiki, a google tool that essentially puts a wiki in a side column on every website if you choose to opt in. Call it a pervasive wiki. Someone mentioned that DotSpots did the same thing. I called up DotSpot founder and CEO Farhad Mohit to see if that was true, to find out what he thought of SideWiki and whether complete transparency on the web – everyone being able to comment on everything, everywhere – was a good thing.
Mohit, who founded Bizrate and Shopzilla, said his business is focused on journalism, whereas SideWiki is focused on the larger web community.
“Our focus will be to enhance the news, their [Google’s] focus will be to enhance all websites. We are already discussing possible ways of sending our data into them and getting their data into us. I think we’re both mutually supportive of each other.”
The DotSpots semantic annotation system allows anyone to attach text, photos or video to any meme (block of text) and to have that annotation instantly distributed to all relevant blocks of text across the Internet. According to Mohit this will bring the “wisdom of crowds” to journalism and help level the playing field between professional reporters and citizen journalists.
If he can get a few thousand citizen journalists, activists and bloggers to contribute, DotSpots will have enough content to sell Dotspot to media outlets as a social media news service, said Mohit. DotSpots gives traditional media a plug-and-play way to incorporate social media into their stories, according to Mohit.
“CNN ended up handling a lot of its Iran election coverage by pointing a camera at a twitter feed. Obviously they are not equipped to handle what is happening here [in social media]. They are worried that people are leaving their site to go to other places on the web for information. Why not just enable a system like DotSpots to bring in information militias to populate your stories?”
There is no solid business model yet, but Mohit said if adoption takes off that he is confident something will emerge. The value for news outlets is people staying longer on the pages and therefor more engaged with advertising
DotSpots' Farhad Mohit on Wikis, Google's Sidewiki and the Future of News [22:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download